Here are 100 books that The Mars House fans have personally recommended if you like
The Mars House.
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I have an amazing daughter in my life, and I want there to be more books for her to read that feature strong, admirable, and good women in leading roles. That’s one of the things I keep an eye out for in the books I read as well as the books I write.
While The Directorate follows a fairly typical path for sci-fi thrillers, its characters are what stand out. The Earth and human colonies on the moon and Mars have united after years of war and created one military/police force. Lieutenant Theresa Gannon is a loyal, young officer suddenly thrust into stardom as the person who foiled a terrorist attack. But as a broiling rebellion heats up and Gannon is now rubbing shoulders with generals and politicians, she starts questioning where her loyalties truly lie.
The year is 2223. Under The Directorate, established after the Great War of Unification, there has been stability, tranquility, and prosperity for all the citizens of the Triad. One of the keystones of the society is the equality of all the peoples of Earth, Luna, and Mars. Lt. Theresa Gannon and her cohorts in the IDS are committed to preserving the peace throughout all the worlds of the Triad. But Gannon has seen fissures begin to appear when a group of daring Earth-Firsters seek to assert their rights as descendants of humanity's first homeworld. Follow Lt. Gannon as she is…
Mateo Taurasi and his family fled their island home when their people turned to sorcery. Mateo’s own magic is tame but it’s still banned in the Vaeringan Empire...and his family still use it every day in their cosy teahouse. The last thing they need is an Imperial barging in to…
I read every science fiction novel I could get when I was a kid. My worldview was shaped by Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and other SF novelists. I want my readers to feel that same “sense of wonder.” I was fortunate to have been exposed to these big ideas early on because they got me interested in artificial intelligence, space colonization, and Big Science – resulting in my computer science work at NASA-Ames Research Center in the 1980s. My fiction and computer games also draw on these concepts, including my hard SF novels: The Forge of Mars, The Digital Dead (sequel to The Forge of Mars), and Prometheus Road, among others.
What if you have an established culture on Mars in 2171 that wants to be independently governed? What if Mars develops a powerful new technology linking human brains to the most advanced AI ever built, giving them almost magical powers of teleportation? I like this book because it’s another great example of how to make advanced technologies and social developments believable through a small number of character perspectives. Arthur C. Clarke said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and I appreciate how this novel was able to accomplish that. As a social scientist, I also appreciate the political aspects of this world as shown through the female lead, who starts as a young student protestor for Martian independence and evolves into a seasoned politician.
She is a daughter of one of Mars's oldest, most conservative Binding Multiples--the extended family syndicates that colonized the red planet. But Casseia Majumdar has a dream of an independent Mars, born in the student protests of 2171. During those brief days of idealism she forged bonds of friendship and hatred that set the stage for an astonishing war or revolution on Mars.
Also known as “Margaret Mead among the Starfleet,” I’m a Princeton professor who has been embedded with NASA missions for two decades as a social scientist. I’ve observed missions to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, and beyond; consulted with NASA as a sociological expert; and written two books, with a third on the way. Growing up, I always loved science and technology, but not just for the ideas: for the people behind the findings, the passion they bring to their work, and the ways in which culture and politics play a role in how science gets done. Writing about this, I hope to humanize science and make it accessible for everyday readers.
If this book were episodes of Friends, it would include The One Where They Landed On Mars Before the Internet Was Invented, The One Where They Mixed Up English and Metric Units, The One Where A Lander Became A Crasher, and The One Where Everyone Fell In Love with Cute Robots.
Conway is the official JPL historian, so he has unprecedented access to the archives and the people behind NASA’s ongoing quest for Mars, and he lays each mission out with its political stakes and highs and lows in painstaking and rich detail. Reading this book reminds me that exploration is just as much about the people as it is about the machines.
Although the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has become synonymous with the United States' planetary exploration during the past half century, its most recent focus has been on Mars. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing through the Mars Phoenix mission of 2007, JPL led the way in engineering an impressive, rapidly evolving succession of Mars orbiters and landers, including roving robotic vehicles whose successful deployment onto the Martian surface posed some of the most complicated technical problems in space flight history. In Exploration and Engineering, Erik M. Conway reveals how JPL engineers' creative technological feats led to major breakthroughs…
Mateo Taurasi and his family fled their island home when their people turned to sorcery. Mateo’s own magic is tame but it’s still banned in the Vaeringan Empire...and his family still use it every day in their cosy teahouse. The last thing they need is an Imperial barging in to…
I’ve always been drawn to the quiet mystery behind ordinary lives, the sense that something sacred hides in the margins. As a caregiver, teacher, and author, I’ve seen how small moments carry enormous weight. That’s why I created this book list: each title touched me deeply and helped shape my own writing, especially Midrash Whispered By Stars. I write to honor forgotten souls, overlooked stories, and the quiet transformations that happen when no one’s watching. These books aren’t just favorites, they’re part of the emotional and spiritual DNA behind everything I create.
I recommend this book because it was one of the first books that made me feel like the world was bigger than anything I’d known.
When I read it, I remember feeling that rush, that sense of being lifted out of my own life and dropped into a place where courage mattered, and strange new landscapes waited around every corner. It wasn’t just adventure; it was escape, wonder, possibility.
Readers who love getting lost in another world will understand that feeling immediately. And it fits my theme because it reminds me that stepping into the unknown, whether on Mars or in an ancient story, can change the way you see everything.
Rediscover the adventure-pulp classic that gave the world its first great interplanetary romance-now featuring an introduction by Junot Diaz
In the spring of 1866, John Carter, a former Confederate captain prospecting for gold in the Arizona hills, slips into a cave and is overcome by mysterious vapors. He awakes to find himself naked, alone, and forty-eight million miles from Earth-a castaway on the dying planet Mars. Taken prisoner by the Tharks, a fierce nomadic tribe of six-limbed, olive-green giants, he wins respect as a cunning and able warrior, who by grace of Mars's weak gravity possesses the agility of a…
I’m a sci-fi author and SF&F TV scriptwriter and I get
off big time on building worlds. And fortunately, my novels and scripts have
had some nice stuff said about their world-building (for which I offer up humble
thanks to the Gods of the Review-Spigot, whoever they may be). So, if you’re someone
who likes their fiction to be immersive and thought-hijacking and
un-walk-away-fromable, tasty world building is likely high on your list of the
Next Books to Fall Brain-first Into. And those are the types of novels I recommend
on this site. Check ‘em out. And say so long to (highly overrated) reality for
a while. Cheers.
This sci-fi series starts with A Princess of Mars and rambles on for like ten follow-up novels over the next 20 or so years. Is it pulp-y and sort of goofy and vaguely offensive in spots? Oh yes. If any of that bums you out, don’t dive in. But you’ll be missing a true classic from the Golden Age of Science Fiction and Fantasy, which laid the groundwork for all the epic SF & F to come. The Barsoom books are as much swash-and-buckle as ray-gun-and-aliens, which is just part of their charm. And Burroughs’ skill at conjuring up a believable-in-a-1940’s-way take on a Martian civilization is kind of wonderful as he builds up a vision of Mars as a resource-strapped planet where a bevy of unique alien races square off against each other with our oh-so-earnest Earth hero John Carter caught in the middle.
When John Carter goes to sleep in a mysterious cave in the Arizona dessert, he wakes up on the planet Mars. There he meets the fifteen foot tall, four armed, green men of mars, with horse-like dragons, and watch dogs like oversized frogs with ten legs. His adventures continue as he battles great white apes, fights plant men, defies the Goddess of Death, and braves the frozen wastes of Polar Mars. In other adventures, the Prince of Helium encounters a race of telepathic warriors, the Princess of Helium confronts the headless men of Mars, Captain Ulysses Paxton learns the secret…
I have been an enthusiast of aviation, space, and science fiction since I was a child. I graduated in aerospace engineering while the Apollo missions reached the Moon, but then in the post-Apollo days, I worked mostly in the mechanical engineering field. In the 1990s, as a professor of machine design, I could return to aerospace. Later, as a member of the International Academy of Astronautics, I led a study group on human Mars exploration and wrote some research books in this field and a few science fiction novels. I have always been fascinated by the idea that humans can become a multi-planetary species, returning to the Moon and going beyond.
As a supporter of private space exploration, I liked this novel and particularly enjoyed the atmosphere reminiscent of Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. A point I liked above all is how the characters succeed in getting along, notwithstanding the stress and the interpersonal problems arising well before the launch.
As often happens, the reality is now going well beyond literature: here, the private mission is made on a meager budget, endangering the astronauts, while in the real world, company spacecraft are even more advanced than those of the space agencies.
I am a professional artist and musician, and I owe a huge debt to Philip K. Dick. I started to read his works at a very young age (I believe I’ve read most everything he’s written at least twice), and my love of his work has continued throughout my life and he has been the greatest inspiration to my music, writing, and art. I felt so influenced and indebted that a created a comic book to honor him and to tell my stories and ideas that have populated my imagination as a result of his books.
I am a huge fan of dreampunk books and this book helped create the genre. Reading it took me into a dreamworld that lead into another dreamworld and then yet another.
As with all Philip K. Dick books I was left wondering if I ever did return to the reality I believe I live in. I also found the character of Palmer Eldritch himself to be one of my all-time favorites.
In the overcrowded world and cramped space colonies of the late twenty-first century, tedium can be endured through the use of the drug Can-D, which enables the user to inhabit a shared illusory world.
But when industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar trip, he brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z, which is far more potent than Can-D. But could the permanent state of drugged illusion it induces be part of something much more sinister?
Also known as “Margaret Mead among the Starfleet,” I’m a Princeton professor who has been embedded with NASA missions for two decades as a social scientist. I’ve observed missions to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, and beyond; consulted with NASA as a sociological expert; and written two books, with a third on the way. Growing up, I always loved science and technology, but not just for the ideas: for the people behind the findings, the passion they bring to their work, and the ways in which culture and politics play a role in how science gets done. Writing about this, I hope to humanize science and make it accessible for everyday readers.
If you think you have a crazy schedule, imagine what it would be like to go to work every day on Mars, while living and working on Earth.
Mars’ day is thirty-six minutes longer than ours, so your standing daily meeting at 9am will begin tomorrow at 9:36am, the day after at 10:12am…and eventually, at two in the morning. I loved learning about how the Mars Exploration Rover scientists at NASA ate endless ice cream and checked their Mars-time watches in an attempt to turn their own bodily clocks off and stay awake despite constant jetlag.
Reading about how they turned themselves into robots, especially during our own “Zoom-era” of constant meetings and emails, I wonder how much the demands of our contemporary, hustling, always-on workplaces do the same to us.
An examination of how the daily work of NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers was organized across three sites on two planets using local Mars time.
In 2004, mission scientists and engineers working with NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) remotely operated two robots at different sites on Mars for ninety consecutive days. An unusual feature of this successful mission was that it operated on Mars time—the daily work was organized across three sites on two planets according to two Martian time zones. In Making Time on Mars, Zara Mirmalek shows that this involved more than a resetting of wristwatches; the team's struggle…
A child of scientists, I grew up planning to be a physicist, but became a novelist instead. Since I straddle the worlds of science and literature, I’ve always valued good science writing. It’s a rare talent to be able to inform and excite the general reader while not oversimplifying the science. I particularly thrill to books about exploring other planets and star systems, because when I was a teenager I read a lot of science fiction, and wished more than anything that someday, when I was much older, I would find myself on a rocket headed for, say, a colony on Mars.
Zubrin’s book proposes a tantalizing what-if. Steve Squyres’ Roving Mars presents readers with an exciting and suspenseful blow-by-blow account of an awesome thing that actually happened: the successful landing on Mars of the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and the jaw-dropping success of those lovable little robotic beetles. It was hoped that the rovers might function for as long as 90 days. Opportunity performed for 15 years. (Spirit, that slacker, phoned it in for only 6 years.) Squyres, an astronomer, was the principal investigator for the mission, and he proves to be an enormously appealing guide: enthusiastic, excitable, grateful, humble. One of the many likable things about this book is that Squyres lets us see how scientists in charge of a years-long multimillion-dollar one-shot mission with a high chance of failure are every bit as superstitious as village peasants: Squyres makes sure to wear his tattered good-luck jeans to every…
Steve Squyres is the face and voice of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission. Squyres dreamed up the mission in 1987, saw it through from conception in 1995 to a successful landing in 2004, and serves as the principal scientist of its $400 million payload. He has gained a rare inside look at what it took for rovers Spirit and Opportunity to land on the red planet in January 2004--and knows firsthand their findings.
I was never going to hack it as a scientist. So I became a journalist instead. After all, bothcareers stem from a sense of wonder about the world and asking questions, looking for answers, and accepting that there might not be any. In 2018, I started my narrative podcast Wild Thing,whichlet me explore some of our weirder collective fascinations (like aliens) using science, history,psychology, and humor. I’d never aimed the podcast at kids, but I realized that all those bigopen-ended questions that I had about everything were the same kinds of questions that kidshad - which really set me up to write the Wild Thing book series.
That discovery would shake ourworld, change our outlook on the universe, and answer the question of whether we’realone.
Sarah Stewart Johnson, a planetary scientist, has spent her life thinking about thispossibility and delves into both her and our obsession with the Red Planet in this beautifully written book. Part memoir, part historical account, and part scientific exploration, thisbook made me want to ditch a career in journalism and take up astrobiology. You’ll never look atMars the same way again.
As a new wave of interplanetary exploration unfolds, a talented young planetary scientist charts our centuries-old obsession with Mars.
'Beautifully written, emotive - a love letter to a planet' DERMOT O'LEARY, BBC Radio 2
Mars - bewilderingly empty, coated in red dust - is an unlikely place to pin our hopes of finding life elsewhere. And yet, right now multiple spacecraft are circling, sweeping over Terra Sabaea, Syrtis Major, the dunes of Elysium and Mare Sirenum - on the brink, perhaps, of a discovery that would inspire humankind as much as any in our history.
